First Baptist Church of Baird

Baird was a railroad town. The Texas and Pacific Railway came through in 1880, and the town took the name of the railroad's surveyor and engineer, Matthew Baird. It was a division point, with a depot, a roundhouse and repair shops. Its post office opened as Vickery in 1881 and took the Baird name in 1883, the year the town replaced Belle Plain as county seat and absorbed most of that town's people. New arrivals pushed the population to 1,200 by the mid-1880s, and Baird incorporated in 1889.

What the plaque says

Organized in 1881 with nine charter members, this was the first Baptist Church founded in the new town of Baird. Elder G. P. Johnson led worship services until the Rev. L. S. Knight was called as the first full-time pastor. After meeting in the town schoolhouse for a few years, a church building was completed at this site in 1889, and the first parsonage was built in 1892. The congregation continued to grow and produced several ministers from its membership. Active in mission work, the church has been a vital part of community life in Baird. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 20 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Old Jail Art Center — 24 mi
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 24 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 24 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Camp Pecan, C.S.A. — steps away
• Callahan County — steps away
• First Presbyterian Church of Baird — 0.2 mi
• Captain Andrew Jackson Berry — 1.3 mi